Etymology, History, and Mythology in the Work of Christopher Beckwith

Home , Celeres, Iranian peoples, Manchuria, Yan (Three Kingdoms)

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Frederick Charles Bowman

Graduate Program in East Asian Langauges and Literatures

The Ohio State University

2011

Thesis Committee:

J. Marshall Unger, Advisor

Charles J. Quinn, Jr.

Frederick Charles Bowman

Abstract

This thesis concerns the work of Christopher Beckwith, particularly Koguryo: The

Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives and Empires of the Silk Road: A History of

Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Its argument is that in these two books Beckwith’s principal goal is to present what he refers to as the Central Eurasian

Cultural Complex and to provide it with as many members as possible. To this end, it is argued, he makes use of onomastic material relating to the ancient Korean kingdom

Koguryŏ from the Samguk sagi, Japanese etymology, and North Iranian ethnic names to create an etymological underpinning between Japan and Koguryŏ, Koguryŏ and the

Scythians, and hence of both with the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex.

Ultimately, it is asserted, Beckwith’s goal is mythopoeic, having as its end the creation of a consistent Central Eurasian mythology, which he calls the First Story, and its opposition to the characteristics of what he calls the Littoral System and its offspring

Modernism, which is in Beckwith’s view responsible for the calamities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A rejection of modernism and rediscovery of our Central

Eurasian cultural heritage as expressed in the First Story is proposed as a remedy for our current situation; establishing the broad scope of the First story and the Central Eurasian

Cultural Complex is necessary to make this a compelling case, and this establishment is the aim that drives Beckwith’s use of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Indo-European materials.

Vita

May 2003……………………………………..St. John’s Jesuit High School

2007…………………………………………..H.A.B. Xavier University

2009 to present……………………………….MA Student, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University

iii

Table of Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………………………………ii

Vita………………………………………………………………………………….iii

Introduction; Puyŏ and Koguryŏ According to Byington……………………………1

Part 1: Koguryŏ, Japan, and the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex……………….7

Part 2: Making sense of the Koguryŏ Foundation Myth……………………………26

Part 3: What does this all mean?...... 31

References…………………………………………………………………………..36

Introduction; Puyŏ and Koguryŏ according to Byington

The subject of this thesis is the Koguryŏ state of Three Kingdoms Korea, documented in Chinese historical sources from the first century BCE, the Puyŏ state, an earlier polity in what is now Manchuria that came into contact with the northeastern state of Yan in the early third century BCE, and how materials related to them, especially the former, are treated in two books by Christopher Beckwith. These books are Koguryo:

The Language of Japan's Continental Relatives (2004, second edition 2007) and Empires of the Silk Road (2009). It will be shown that Beckwith, contrary to his statement at the beginning of Empires of the Silk Road that his aim is "to write a realistic, objective view of the history of Central Eurasia and Central Eurasians," has made otherwise directed use of material relating to Koguryŏ in his presentation, the aim of which is to increase the number of adherents to what he refers to as the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex

(CECC). This is especially apparent in the realm of etymology, in which Beckwith makes use of an unexplained, seemingly selective Middle Chinese reconstruction referred to as "Archaic Northeastern Middle Chinese" to justify his readings of certain Chinese characters used in the Puyŏ and Koguryŏ foundation myths. These readings are made to resemble words that are taken to have a particular significance within the Central

Eurasian Cultural Complex.

Ultimately, it will be demonstrated that Beckwith's aim is in essence mythopoeic.

Beckwith (2009: xxiii, xxiv) states that his intention is to discredit the received opinion that Central Eurasian peoples such as the Scythians or the Mongols were and are simply

"barbarians," which in itself is of course quite unobjectionable. However, there is a second aim concomitant to this first. Namely, this is the establishment of the Central

Eurasian Cultural Complex and the opposition of this to the peripheral or Littoral cultures, particularly those of Western Europe, from which emerges what Beckwith calls

Modernism, which in addition to the devastation of the peoples of Central Eurasia by colonial powers has given rise to the rejection of all rationality, the degradation of art, and indeed all the ills of modern life. These two entities are seen as combating forces in world history, and in marshaling the forces of the CECC against the Littoral powers, particularities of the history and languages of CECC peoples are frequently overlooked, though this may on the other hand be due to the very broad perspective that Beckwith

(2009: viii) states is necessary for his project. Though not in keeping with a realistic, objective history of Central Eurasia and Central Eurasians, Beckwith's opposition of these two warring forces bears a certain similarity to the myths he records in the Prologue to Empires of the Silk Road in which, ultimately, "the unjust overlords who suppressed the righteous people and stole their wealth were finally overthrown, and the men who did the deed were national heroes" (11).

This thesis consists of three parts. The first part, containing the core of the thesis, is an assessment of Beckwith's use of etymology and linguistic reconstruction - Japanese,

Chinese, and Indo-European sources are all made use of- in Koguryo and Empires of the

Silk Road. The second part continues the first, shedding some critical light on Beckwith's presentation by considering Byington's analysis of what the Koguryŏ foundation myth was meant to do and how the Puyŏ and Koguryŏ foundation myths, which Beckwith takes as comprising a unity, are in fact distinct. The third part concludes the thesis,

considering Beckwith's aims in making the use he does of his data, whether it concerns

Koguryŏ, Japan, or the steppes of Central Eurasia.

Before proceeding to Beckwith's work, however, it may be beneficial to briefly introduce Puyŏ, Koguryŏ, and Three Kingdoms Korea to readers unfamiliar with the subject. This is not by any means meant to serve as a comprehensive account, but rather as a short introductory sketch and orientation. Owing to a relative paucity of English sources on the subject and to my own deficiency in reading Chinese and Korean, in which the bulk of the relevant scholarship is written, I am particularly indebted to the work of Mark Edward Byington, especially his 2003 dissertation A History of the Puyŏ

State, its History, and its Legacy and the two Early Korea volumes issued by the Early

Korea Project at Harvard University with Byington as head editor (Volume 1:

Reconsidering Early Korean History Through Archaeology, 2008; Volume 2: The

Samhan Period in Korean History, 2009).

The history of early Korea is a knotty and sometimes contentious subject. An initial difficulty is presented by the nature of the surviving source material, which is quite patchy and has not infrequently been compiled from earlier works centuries after the events it describes (Byington 2003: 1). Further obviating factors include nationalistic influences on scholars in China and North Korea; Chinese scholarship may claim Puyŏ as an ethnically Chinese state as it lay within the borders of present-day Jilin province

(Kang 2008: 23), while North Korean scholars have taken the southernmost settlements of Koguryŏ near present-day Pyongyang to be temporally anterior to that state's more northerly holdings. These southern foundations of Koguryo, labeled the Taedong River

Culture, are held to be the cradle not only of Korean but also of human civilization (Kang

2008: 24). To facilitate the reader's comprehension of the following pages I have put together a brief sketch of the prominent states of early Korea, making particular use of the work of Mark Edward Byington.1

Puyŏ 夫餘 : This was not a Korean state, but its legacy exerted sufficient influence over subsequent states on the Korean peninsula to merit its treatment in conjunction with them. Puyŏ's origins, according to Byington, are to be found in the

Xituanshan archaeological culture of present-day Jilin province, attested from around the

11th century BCE (Byington 2003: 108), whose people came in contact with the northern

Chinese state of Yan in the early 3rd century BCE as a result of Yan's eastward expansion into Manchuria and the Korean peninsula (98). Signs of this contact include iron implements of Chinese making and new pottery types (98, 108, 182).

Byington contends that this contact with late Warring-States and, later, Han China with its superior technology and more stratified social organization initiated a process of state formation in which the agricultural surplus resultant from newly-introduced iron implemenst, new modes of social organization, and increased economic prosperity resultant from trade combined to form the centralized state of Puyŏ from the people or peoples who made up the Xituanshan culture (182). Of the Puyŏ people themselves, unfortunately, comparatively little is known: who exactly they were, what language they spoke, and so on may forever be lost to history. No historical record written by the Puyŏ people concerning themselves has survived, if ever there were any (9). The only record

1 A satisfactory impression of the historical and archaelogical complexities involved in the study of early Korea cannot here be given, as beyond the scope of the present work and the present capacities of its author. Readers interested in a thorough treatment of this complicated subject may consult Barnes 1999 and Gardiner 1969 in addition to Byington 2003, 2008, and 2009. 4

now extant that includes a description of the Puyŏ people and their customs is the Weizhi, a third-century Chinese history.

From its humble beginnings, the Puyŏ state rose to a position of prominence in

Northeast Asia, entering into an alliance with the Eastern Han dynasty in the first century

BCE (6). Relations between Puyŏ and China continued to be amicable, one king even being given a jade suit in which to be buried, which in China was only permitted of nobles and the emperor (6). Puyŏ's existence, however, was something of a precarious one, and it was dependent on Chinese commanderies established in the Liaodong region against hostile neighbors, such as the Xianbei and, later, Koguryŏ (7). By the late third century the Xianbei had wrested control of Liaodong from the Chinese commanderies, leaving Puyŏ vulnerable. Two Xianbei attacks, one in 285 and the other in 346, effectively destroyed the state (7), though its territories were soon after occupied by

Koguryŏ, of which it served as a tributary before being assimilated in 410.

Though little is known of the Puyŏ people themselves, it is clear that they were quite influential and were considered quite important by later states formed in their sphere of influence. The Koguryŏ foundation myth, for example, is largely an adaptation of the Puyŏ foundation myth, and the kings of Koguryo claimed descent from refugees from Puyŏ. Byington sees this as a way of a new state bolstering its claims to political legitimacy by claiming antecedents of antiquity and accomplishment, a phenomenon not without parallel in East Asia (496). This point, that the Koguryŏ foundation myth is adapted from the Puyo myth to serve Koguryo's own political needs, is of particular importance. This subject will receive further attention in my treatment of Beckwith's analysis of the Koguryŏ foundation myth in Part 2.

Three Kingdoms Korea: The three kingdoms in question are Koguryŏ, in the north of the peninsula and into Manchuria, Silla in the southeast, and Paekche in the southwest.

A further polity known as Kaya existed between Paekche and Silla; its identity is disputed. We are more fortunate in terms of historical records with the Three Kingdoms than we are with Puyŏ, but not by too wide a margin: there are two prominent histories of

Three Kingdoms Korea, the Samguk sagi 三國史記 (1145), an imperially sanctioned history, and the Samguk yusa三國遺事, privately compiled in ca. 1285 (Byington 2003:

1). However, these are "selective compilation(s) of disparate materials that served various functions in assorted contexts over a very long period of time" (1); furthermore, though they describe the Three Kingdoms (1st c. BCE-668 CE) and Unified Silla (668-

935) periods of Korean history, they are both products of the Koryŏ Dynasty (918-1312), and so their reliability as records of Koguryŏ, Silla, and Paekche may be compromised.

Part 1. Koguryŏ, Japan, and the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex

This section will treat Beckwith's use of etymology and will contend that the aim underlying his method is to enlarge the scope of his Central Eurasian Cultural Complex.

As a convenient point of departure I have chosen two Japanese words, whose alleged connections with Koguryo words are to be found in Beckwith 2007 Both have been discussed in Unger 2009.2

a. Old Japanese topo-: topo-ru topo-su, topo-si

These three are transparently root-formant strings: by adding the formants ru

(endoactive) su (exoactive) and si (stative) to the root topo- we get “to close a distance; to pass by,” “to cause to pass by/through” and “being a distance away; far.” However,

Beckwith (2006, 138) connects topo-ru with Koguryŏan tawŋ, “mountain pass,” with the affixation of a verbal formant suffix pi to yield tawŋ-pi, which he has as parallel to an

Old Japanese tewŋpi. Leaving aside the other problems this involves, the string tewŋpi could never yield Modern Japanese tō, which is what occurs in tōru, tōsu, and tōi; topo could, can, and does. Furthermore, although a pJ velar nasal phoneme has been proposed

(Unger 2008), a distinct OJ ŋ distinct from OJ g is not recognized and a prenazalized p would be reflected in later b.

2 Additional observations on Beckwith's etymologies have been made in Pellard's 2006 review. Byington 2006 offers a critique of Beckwith's use of historical and archaeological data; interested readers may find these two to be useful resources. 7

b. Old Japanese kuti, kutuwa

Beckwith proposes a Koguryo *kuәrtsi (2006, 128) as the cognate to Japanese kuti, mouth, which he takes as a combined form with the the addition of a nominal suffix tsi (Ibid. 119) from *tu-i. This necessitates the ponderous interpretation of the compound kutuwa, “horse’s bit,” as involving the reflex of this *kuәrtsi, kutu, in which just a part of the nominal suffix is to be seen, namely *tu, and then wa, “ring.” However, this is more simply understood as a case of noun apophony, in which the bound form kutu is in complementary distribution with the free form kuti. Just as OJ ko-no-pa 'tree leaf' ~ kwi

'tree' and similar pairs show the alternation otsu-t y p e o -ending syllables with otsu-t y p e i - ending syllables, so too does kutuwa ~ kuti >*kutwi, taking into account that the kō-otsu distinction ti ≠ twi had collapsed by the 8th century.3

Accordingly, one can see that the etymologies that Beckwith proposes are problematic, as is clear to anyone familiar with with OJ phonology and the reconstruction of pre-OJ stages. Why does Beckwith indulge in such obviously incorrect comparisons?

A likely motive is not hard to find.

1b. The Central Eurasian Cultural Complex

Beckwith sees as the primal forces of world history what he terms the Central

Eurasian Cultural Complex on the one hand, and the Littoral System on the other. Of these, the former, having its origin with Indo-European peoples in Central Asia, particularly the Scythians, is according to Beckwith the origin of Western culture as well as the ultimate source, on the other side of the world, for certain aspects of culture seen in

3 Though certain particulars of OJ phonology remain contentious, the situation is not as bleak as Beckwith 2007 suggests and a stable consensus on the value of the kō-otsu distinctions does exist; see Lange 1971, Martin 1987, and Unger 1993. Frellesvig 2010: 26-34 provides a useful overview. 8

Koguryŏ and Japan. Beckwith elaborates on the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex and its enormous extent as follows:

The most crucial element of the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex was the sociopolitical-religious ideal of the heroic lord and his comitatus, a war band of his friends sworn to defend him to the death. …The core comitatus consisted of a small band of warriors, who are called or referred to as friends. … The core group – usually a small number of men – committed ritual suicide (or was executed) to accompany the lord if he predeceased the group, and each man was buried “armed to the teeth” for battle in the next world. (2009 12-13)

The comitatus is attested directly or indirectly in historical sources on the Hittites, the Achaemenid Persians, the Scythians, the Hsiung-nu, the ancient and early medieval Germanic peoples, the Sasanid Persians, the Huns, the Hephthalites, the Koguryŏ, the early dynastic Japanese, the Turks (including at least the Turk, Khazars, and Uighurs), the Sogdians, the Tibetans, the Slavs, the Khitans, the Mongols, and others. (15-16)

The early Japanese mounted archer warrior, the bushi, like the later samurai, his institutional descendant, was “merely one variant of the Asian-style mounted archer predominant in the Middle East and the steppe; similarities among all the fighting men of these early centuries of Japanese history far outweigh the differences” (Farris 1995: 7) The close warrior companions of a lord in early Japan also were expected to commit suicide to be buried with him (called junshi ‘following in death’) and regularly did so. (105)

Beckwith takes the existence of similar conventions in warfare as evidence a single prototypical comitatus in Central Eurasia from which all similar systems in all subsequent civilizations are directly descended. Evidence of any sort of war-band or bodyguard is, to Beckwith, incontrovertible evidence of such a comitatus, or at least of its presence somewhere in the remote past, even in cases lacking any mention of ritual suicide or execution of members of the core comitatus, a significant facet of the comitatus for Beckwith, is made.

In a footnote (2009: 4, fn. 11), for example, Beckwith claims, “The Celeres, the mounted bodyguard of Romulus mentioned in Livy (Foster 1988: 56-57), was certainly a

comitatus, at least in origin.” The relevant passage in Ab Urbe Condita (I:15) reads simply,

Multitudini tamen gratior fuit quam patribus, longe ante alios acceptissimus militum animis: trecentosque armatos ad custodiam corporis, quos Celeres appellavit, non in bello solum sed etiam in pace habuit. [Romulus] was more pleasing to the multitude than to the patricians, and best received by far in the minds of his soldiers. He kept about him three hundred bodyguards, whom he called Celeres, not only in war, but in peace as well.

Exactly what in this makes it clear that the Celeres were a comitatus according to

Beckwith’s definition, and, even if they were, why such a social structure should be a direct continuation of the Central Eurasian comitatus, I cannot say. Perhaps this is why

Beckwith qualifies his statement with “at least in origin.” Is the Praetorian Guard therefore to be taken as a comitatus? Is the private army of Sulla? But, as will be seen later, such a casual approach, announcing a connection with the Central Eurasian Cultural

Complex without any supporting evidence, is typical of Beckwith.

In opposition to this Central Eurasian Cultural Complex, he writes, stands the

Littoral System: the mercantile, imperialistic peoples on the Central Eurasian periphery, who impinge upon Central Eurasia from the age of European expansion in the sixteenth century, culminating in the rise of “Modernism” in the eighteenth century with exponents like Rousseau. Beckwith summarizes the development:

[Modernism] began in the concatenation of economic, demographic political, and intellectual changes that took place in Europe and the Europe-dominated Littoral System with the spread of industrialization and urbanization. … In those turbulent concentrations of humanity, consciousness of the great changes that were happening at an ever faster pace in science and technology encouraged those who sided with “the moderns” against “the ancients” in intellectual and artistic life. The leaders of mass urban culture also favored popularism, an idea developed by Enlightenment thinkers and revolutionaries. Joined together with other ideas and trends, they developed into the essential driving force behind the political, social, and cultural changes that so greatly affected the entire continent: Modernism.

The core idea of Modernism is simple, and seems harmless enough by itself: what is modern – new and fashionable – is better than what it replaces. (…) But Modernism was not merely a finite sequence in which something new (the industrial and urban) replaced something old (the aristocratic and rural) and that was that. If only what is new is good, it is by definition necessary to continue to continually create or do new things. Full-blown Modernism meant, and still means, permanent revolution: continuous rejection of the tradition or immediately preceding political, social, artistic, and intellectual order. (2009, 288-89)

This interpretation involves such a conflation of historical periods that untangling it would take up more room than can here be afforded it. Briefly put, though, Beckwith takes the rise of Modernism to be the result of the supplanting of aristocratic ideals of social organization mediated in Europe through a feudalism ultimately derived directly from the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex and the inherently aristocratic comitatus by revolutionary modes of thought favoring democracy (Beckwith frequently brackets democracy with ironic quotation marks; see e.g. 2009: 266, 296). When this order has been lost, so too are the traditional arts, and Beckwith spends no little time berating T.S.

Eliot (2009: 263, 296), Pablo Picasso (295), Igor Stravinsky (295), and even Frank Zappa

(424) for their rejection of Nature, Reason, and Beauty.

Just as the loss of traditional, aristocratic values associated with, and indeed directly derived from the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex, is responsible for the ills of the 20th and 21st centuries, so too is the reclamation of that heritage the key to our recovery. “Central Eurasia is our homeland,” says Beckwith, “the place where our civilization started” (2009: 319) Thus Beckwith opposes the Central Eurasian Cultural

Complex on the one hand and Modernism, the offspring of urban, industrialized Littoral culture on the other. Whatever the reality of these two as real, monolithic cultural entities may be, Beckwith clearly favors the former, and the task of adding more peoples to its

domain appears to motivate his entire etymological apparatus, in both Beckwith 2007 and

Beckwith 2009.

1c. Novus Ordo Seclorum: A new Ordo for the ages

Having reviewed Beckwith’s Central Eurasian Cultural Complex, we may now return profitably return to his treatment of Koguryŏ; a number of bizarre and unexplained passages in Beckwith 2007 make a great deal more sense when viewed in its light.

Among these the following is prominent:

It is not possible to imagine that large armies of Japanese went to the Korean Peninsula, fought significant battles, and returned to Japan – as we know they did – without adopting as many contemporaneous continental practices as they could. Since the Koguryŏ kingdom was constantly involved in fighting with both the Chinese to the west and the Central Eurasian steppe peoples to the northwest, the Koguryŏ armies must have been ‘state of the art’ in military technology at the time. When the battle-hardened Japanese warriors and their aristocratic leaders brought this technology – and probably a certain ‘attitude’ [italics FCB] – back to Japan with them, along with some warriors and others native to the Korean Peninsula, whichever Japanese kingdom they fought for would have had an immense advantage over all of the others. (23)

The "certain attitude” to which Beckwith refers is of course the Central Eurasian Cultural

Complex and the comitatus system, of which Beckwith sees Koguryŏ and Japan as the easternmost outposts. This preoccupation with enlarging the scope of the Central

Eurasian Cultural Complex, as we will see, informs Beckwith 2007 in quite fundamental ways, even in its section on the pronunciation of what Beckwith terms Archaic

Northeastern Middle Chinese, which forms the philological basis of Beckwith’s interpretation of the Koguryŏ place names in the Samguk sagi.

I do not possess the necessary background in Chinese historical phonology to evaluate Beckwith’s Archaic Northeastern Middle Chinese in detail. However, the following observations can be made. Beckwith’s reconstruction of this purported variety

of Middle Chinese is surprisingly unsystematic. For his sources, he cites only the

Samguk sagi material, though viewed, in contrast to the work of other scholars, as reflecting regional Middle Chinese pronunciation. Yet he does not establish how he knows what this pronunciation was. Further, he does not attempt to reconstruct a phonemic inventory of this dialect, perhaps because he means his treatment to be a

“preliminary attempt to describe some of the phonological features of this language”

(2006: 93) rather than an exhaustive treatment. He instead arranges his data into onset consonants, syllable nuclei, and syllable codas. Further still, considering, as he notes, that “the reconstruction of Koguryŏ depends more than anything else on the Chinese phonetic value of the characters when they were adopted as transcriptions for Koguryŏ forms” (93), Beckwith devotes comparatively little space in his book to what is to be its foundation: a mere twelve pages out of 254, excluding prefatory material and indices.

If the foregoing give the impression of an ad hoc arrangement, what follows gives that impression an emphatic confirmation. Of the three syllable nuclei included in

Beckwith’s reconstruction, two are of particular importance:

OChi *wa = foreign o = Northern OChi *o > NMC *o

OChi *-u > MChi *-aw ~ NE MChi *-υ

Both of the above are to be found in a single word that is especially important to

Beckwith: Wantu 丸都 , the name of the city founded by Tongmyong 東明 in the Puyŏ foundation story4 given in the Lun Heng 論衡5. Beckwith gives this toponym the reading

*Ortυ and says of it,

4 Take note that, in Beckwith's analysis, the Puyŏ foundation myth and its later adaptation in Koguryŏ are one and the same story referring to the same ethnic group; see 2009: 378 and his presentation of a combined Puyŏ-Koguryŏ story in 2007: 29 and 2009:7. 13

The name is certainly a transcription of the Central Eurasian culture word ordu ~ ordo ‘royal court, camp, capital’, which is well known from later times in other neighboring languages (see chapters 2 and 3). (96-7)

Turning to chapters two and three, we read:

After their conflict with the Chinese at the time of Wang Mang, the Koguryŏ moved east into the commanderies of Liao-Tung and Hsuang-t’u. The early Koguryo capital on the Yalu River was *Ortυ, usually transcribed as Wan-tu (MChi *γwantu, NKor Hwando). This is clearly the same word as the much later attested, well-known Turkic and Mongolic word, ordu~ ordo ~ orda, ‘royal capital; camp of a lord and his comitatus.’ (37)

The name is the same as the Central Eurasian culture word ordu ~ ordo ‘capital, royal court, royal encampment’, well known from medieval times on. (52)

Ordo also appears in Empires of the Silk Road:

One of he crucial elements of the comitatus was that it was the it was the lord’s personal guard corps. The warriors stayed near him day and night, no further than the door of his splendid golden hall or yurt, which stood in the center of the ordo, the camp of the ruler’s comitatus and capital of the realm. (18)

Like some other Central Eurasian peoples in the northeast, the Khitan still practiced the traditional comitatus, at least during their formative years, and their state was clearly organized around the “khan and four bey” system, with a particularly interesting variant in which the Khitan had five capitals, or ordu, one for each of the four directions plus one for the center. (173)

One may safely say that it is a suspiciously convenient happenstance that among the "most remarkable features" of Archaic Northeastern Middle Chinese Beckwith lists

(2006: 93), are the retention of Old Chinese *-r “in certain environments” (which ones,

Beckwith does not say) and the apparent preservation of Old Chinese *o, also “in some environments," which turn out to be just those that allow Beckwith to make the connection between Wantu and ordo. The conditioning environment for each retained archaic feature, it turns out, is implicitly present just in case a particular word requires some phonological adjustment to resemble another of particular importance in

5 'A first century collection of philosophical essays written by Wang Chong 王充 (27 A.D. - ca. 100 A.D.).' (Byington 2003: 29) 14

Beckwith’s Central Eurasian Cultural Complex. More than this, Beckwith apparently is looking for a solution to the problem of the word’s origin: “Since the Turkic and

Mongolic words are problematic – the word is surely a loan into Turkic, and probably into Mongolian as well – the possibility exists that it is an early Puyŏ -Koguryŏic word”

(37). Not only is Beckwith thus able to connect Koguryŏ with the Central Eurasian

Cultural Complex, but he is also able to provide the origin of one of its most important cultural terms. One even gets the impression that Beckwith has postulated υ as the vowel in 都 for no other reason than to explain the alternation of the final vowel in ordo and ordu.

This impression is heightened by the scantiness of the philological backing for his claims, frequently mentioned only in brief footnotes, and obviously ancillary to his look- alike etymologizing. Compare the footnote in which he justifies his emendation of Old

Chinese wa to NMC o (2007: 97, fn. 6: “Baxter reconstructs some MChi *-wa- as Ochi *- o-…”) to the extremely confident tone with which he identifies his *Ortυ with ordo:

“The name is certainly a transcription of" (2007: 97), “This is clearly the same word as"

(37) and, more flatly, “The name is the same as” (52) ordo. In fact, this is about as self- evident as the "fact" that the Celeres were a comitatus of the Central Eurasian type; no support for the claim is ever given, nor is any explanation as to how, when, and under what circumstances borrowing of the word from “Puyŏ-Koguryŏic” into the Turkic and

Mongolic languages could have taken place. This self-reflexive reasoning is typical of

Beckwith's entire argument.

1d. The Scythians

Beckwith’s most circular maneuver involves the North Iranian nomads known to classical historians such as Herodotus as Scythians, whom he considers to be if not the originators, at least the perfectors of the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex, and so very important indeed. He says, for example,

Non-Turkic, non-Mongolic, and non-Tungusic peoples have always been part of the Central Eurasian world—including the nomadic lifestyle, which seems to have been perfected by the Iranian-speaking Scythians. (2006, 194)

The essential features of the comitatus and its oath are known to have existed as early as the Scythians and seem difficult to separate clearly from the oath of brotherhood to death, which is attested from ancient sources on the Scythians through the medieval Secret History of the Mongols. (2009, 12-13)

Starting from this foundation, Beckwith sets out to forge a link between the Scythians and Koguryŏ and therefore, according to his interpretation, Japan as well. In doing so he makes extensive and exclusive use of a monograph by Oswald Szemerényi, Four Old

Iranian Ethnic Names: Scythian, Skudra, Sogdian, Saka (1980).

Of the four names, Szemerényi sees three, Scythian, Skudra, and Sogdian, as simply different outcomes of the same Old Iranian ethnonym, namely proto-Iranian

Skuda, meaning “archer.” This in turn he derives from the zero grade of IE skeud- “to shoot.” The particulars of the phonological processes by which the three names are so derived are somewhat knotty, particularly for one who is yet a stranger to the Iranian branch of Indo-European and all its witness languages. However, in their broad outlines they are given by Szemerényi as follows:

Scythian. (Σκύθης, pl.Σκύθαι)This is name by which the Scythians were known to the Greeks, and hence to the Romans. On the basis of this loan form containing an aspirate, and an Akkadian form referring to the same people, Aškuz, Szemerényi posits

an underlying form Skuða. This form is according to Szemerényi able to explain both the

Greek aspirate (as in Iranian names with –farnah being rendered in Greek with φαρν- orφερνηςand the voiced alveolar fricative of the Akkadian word (17). In interpreting the name, Szemerényi posits the Proto-Iranian form *Skuda, yielding a later *Skuða,

“archer,” making note of the Scythians’ famed skill for mounted archery and archaeological finds of many arrowheads and related objects at Scythian sites (19). To this group he adds the name Skules, which according to Herodotus was the name of the

Scythians for themselves. He says,

The fact that the descendants of Kolaxais, the Scythian kings, are called Paralatai (Hdt.), and this corresponds to Avestan paraðāta- ‘voran, an die Spitze gestellt’, proves that intervocalic d (or –ð), at least in some parts of the Scythian linguistic territory had changed by Herodotus’ time to l. (22)

The two forms Scythian and Skules are thus differentiated by the time of their respective borrowings into Greek: while the former is attested in Hesiod, ca. 700 BCE (16), the former does not appear until Herodotus over two centuries later: *Skuða underlies one and *Skula the other (23).

As for the the proto-Iranian *Skuda from which Szemerényi derives both Scythian and Skules, he takes it as a form derived from the zero grade of an IE root skeud- “to shoot,” with reflexes in OE sceotan, ON skjota, and OHG sciozan (20). That the sure reflexes of such a root with a meaning “shoot” are isolated to Germanic and absent from

Iranian complicates the matter, however.6

6 Pokornoy (IEW: 954f.) lists as possible cognates to the Germanic group from *skeud Lithuanian skudrùs 'swift,' OCS kudati ' t h r o w , ' and Sanskrit codayati 'drive, incite;' given the semantic range of these words, however, and their lack of a connection to the use of missile weapons, it may reasonably be argued that the Germanic sense is a secondary development. The Sanskrit, for example, is transparently a causative form of a root cud "to impel, incite;" could not the Germanic words be taken as similar causative forms of *skeud in the sense of 'swift,' especially with the Lithuanian skudrùs and OE sceot 'swift' in mind? Of course, it is also possible that the Germanic group is unique, deriving from a different IE root not elsewhere attested. In any case, no Iranian reflex of the root is given. 17

Skudra. Szemerényi’s argument is here archaeological. The tomb of Darius the

Great is graced by a complement of thirty throne-bearers engraved in stone, the dress of each of whom is presented in meticulous detail. Under each is a cuneiform inscription of the name of the people the figure represents. Among the figures who are presented in typical Scythian dress is one bearing the inscription Skudra. From this comes the conclusion that Skudra, too, is a derivative form of Proto-Iranian *Skuda (25-6).

Sogdian. Szemerényi argues against previous interpretations of this name as a toponym, making use of the Avestan locution Gavam yam Suγða-šayanam, “Gava, the settlement of the Sogdians,” in which Suγða is an ethnonym, and of Greek Σόγδοι (38).

Comparing the Middle Sogdian form of the word Suγð- and the Suguda found in Old

Persian inscriptions, Szemerényi concludes that a hypothetical Old Sogdian Suγða presupposes an earlier form in which the ð had to come in intervocalic position in order to allow for its lenition from d in pre-Old Sogdian. Of the two possible ways by which an Old Sogdian form Suγða could arise (*Suguda > *Suguða > *Sugða > Suγða; *Sukuda

> *Sukuða > *Sukða > *Suγða), Szemerényi favors the latter, elaborating:

It is clear that *Suguda is not amenable to an appropriate interpretation in Iranian. On the other hand, *Sukuda offers just as clearly the right solution: it is nothing else but the anaptyctic form of the Pontic. Skuda. By a curious interplay of dialectical indiosyncracies [sic], the anaptyctic *Sukuda was in Sogdian again syncopated to Suγða, whereas in Old Persian this form was taken over (with stops) as Sugda, and then given, at least for a short time, an anaptyctic variant Suguda. (39)

Saka, however, bears no relation to either of the three previous names according to Szemerényi’s analysis. Rather, he posits that this is a different designation for nomadic

North Iranian peoples used by their settled, city-dwelling counterparts, ultimately deriving from an Iranian verbal root sak- “go, flow, run” and meaning “wanderer, vagrant

nomad” (45) Thus, for Szemerényi, of the four ethnic names, three are derived from a proto-Iranian Skuda, “archer,” and one is not.

Beckwith, however, goes considerably further than this. Whereas Szemerényi derives only the three names Scythian, Skudra, and Sogdian from Skuda, Beckwith includes Saka in his reckoning. Beckwith explains his rationale,

Unfortunatley, he [Szemerényi] follows the old idea (probably a folk etymology) that Saka is a Persian name for the Scythians derived from the Persian verb sak- ‘to flow, go, run’, and therefore supposedly could mean ‘roamer, wanderer, vagrant nomad.’ However, his conclusion regarding the name Skudra states that it is “a derivative of Skuda, name of the Scythians.” This means that because Old Persian actually preserves the earlier form *Skuda in this local name, the usual Persian name of the Scythians changed at some point from *Skuda to Saka. (2009, 379)

In addition to the obscurity of the last sentence here, the phrase “the old idea” is, I believe, misleading. In fact, Szemerényi proposes his etymology of Saka to counter a previous derivation from a root cognate with Indic *śak, “to be powerful,” seen in

Sanskrit śaknomi, id. Szemerényi notes that the Iranian cognates of sak- are so predominately focused on the semantic range of knowing, learning, and teaching as to suggest that the Sanskrit sense of ability and strength is secondary, and that the existence of a sak- “to be powerful” in Iranian is highly unlikely (43-44). Further, again citing previous scholarship, Szemerényi proposes that the Persians applied the name Saka to their nomadic counterparts because nomadism – rather than some linguistic or ethnic difference – was what saliently differentiated them (44). If anything, Szemerényi’s is a novel proposal. Beckwith’s casual invocation of folk etymology, reminiscent of his use of

Japanese data and his asseverations concerning ordo/ordu and the Koguryŏ capital

Wantu, lacks support. He continues,

Rather than being a completely new word, as Szemerényi argues, in view of the form *Saγla ~ *Saklai it seems clear that the name Saka, which as the sources say is the 19

“Persian” name for all Scythians, is a form of the very same ethnonym, *Skuda, via the known intermediate form *Skula. The change evidently took place via insertion of the epenthetic vowel a to break up the initial cluster sk, as in other cases. The foreign (non- Persian) name *Sakula thus became Saka in Persian, probably via an intermediary *Sakla, or perhaps *Sak(u)da ~ *Sak(u)ra. (2009, 379)

What is the form *Saklai on which Beckwith’s etymologizing depends? It is none other than his proposed reading for “the northern kingdom from which the Puyŏ-

Koguryŏic peoples originated, according to their origin myth” (378). The basis on which

Beckwith posits this form is to be found in Endnote 13 of Empires of the Silk Road:

*Saklai 索離 NMan suǒlí from Late Ochi *saklai, a later form of the Scythians, Sogdians, and Sakas, q.v. appendix B. In Beckwith (2004a: 31-32) I unfortunately followed other scholars’ erroneous emendations of the text. The initial character found in most texts, 索NMan suǒ (MChi sak) – or in some cases NMan 橐 tuó (MChi tak) – is a phonetic transcription unconnected to the putatively “correct” *Ko (in Sino-Korean reading), which gives *Koryǒ, and nonsense, for both the Koguryǒ (=Koryǒ) and the Puyǒ myths. (388)

This requires further explanation. Beckwith’s (2007) presentation of the 'Puyŏ-

Koguryŏic' foundation myth in the Lun Heng (soon to be revisited) begins, “Formerly, in the north, in the country of Koryŏ, a maidservant who was the daughter of the River Lord was sequestered by the king when he went out” (31). Koryŏ is the erroneous reading to which Beckwith refers. Apparently, the claim of Beckwith 2009 that the reading Koryŏ yields nonsense is related to the statement in Beckwith 2007, “Since the kingdom to the north of Koguryŏ was in fact Puyŏ for the early part of the period under consideration, it would be odd for the Koguryŏ to have said that the ancestral founder of the Koguryŏ kingdom fled from a northern kingdom named Koguryo” (32). By dint of this, Beckwith

(2009) argues that the initial Ko is a faulty reading. He continues,

Although it is my fault for having trusted the “editions” I used, unfortunately there are no true critical editions (with critical apparatus, etc.) of those texts, or indeed of any Chinese texts, with a single exception (Thompson 1979), as far as I know. Critical editions of

texts in Greek and Latin, as well as in Arabic and other medieval Western languages, have been produced since the nineteenth century, but as pointed out by Thompson (1979: xvii), Sinologists, whether Chinese or non-Chinese, mostly do not even know what a critical edition is, and those who think they know are adamantly opposed to them. Until this sorry state of affairs changes, Chinese texts will continue to be unreliable, and Sinology will remain in this respect a backward field. (388-89)

That is, Beckwith has based his reading *Saklai on texts he has not cited.

Moreover, this is yet another circular argument. *Saklai, a proposed emendation for

*Koryŏ presented on the basis of uncited textual variants, is given as the justification of a form *Sak(u)la, a supposed intermediate form in the chain *Skuda *Skula (epenthesis)

*Sakula *Sakla Saka. The connection with the supposed origin of Scythian in Skuda,

“archer,” provides one more link between Koguryŏ and a salient feature of Beckwith’s

Central Eurasian Cultural Complex, namely archery; the reading *Saklai makes this connection possible. The intervening steps – the epenthetic a breaking up the cluster sk and the subsequent loss of the l to yield Saka – are all simply thrown together in service of this connection without regard to the historical phonology of any relevant Iranian languages.

Nor is it only the Iranian languages that are given short shrift; materials particularly concerning Koguryŏ are also overlooked. Beckwith's form *Saklai, emendation of his earlier suggestion *Kaklai, relies upon his reconstruction of the reading for the character strings 高驪高麗高句麗橋離, according to Beckwith all used to write the same name, Koguryo. This reconstruction, however, has been called into question, as has the identity of the four. Unger (2009: 43, fn. 3), drawing on

Mabuchi 1999, elaborates:

The gloss OJ kure 'Koguryŏ' on呉 demands explanation. The word J kookuri < EMJ kaukuri高句麗 (NKD 7:460c) is not found in Kojiki (712), Nihon shoki (720), or Shoku Nihongi (797). The principal name for Koguryŏ in these works is written高麗, which was glossed EMJ koma 'Koguryŏ; Korea' and probably goes back to OJ kwoma (rather than koma) in view of EMJ koma 狛(dog), a likely reborrowing of pKJ *koma > OJ kuma 'bear'; note also 固麻,the name of a Paekche capital recorded in Liang shu, which would be OJ kwoma. No man'yogana reading of 高麗is known (NKD 8:371d), but EMJ kaurai is attested in 1019 (NKD 7:618c), and it is doubtful that 高麗was read kure since 呉(presumably glossed kure) contrasts with in at least one Nihon shoki passage (37th years 2nd month of Ojin). As Mabuchi explains,高麗 and呉 both came to designate Koguryŏ, but Japanese of the early Kofun period did not at first equate the land they called kwoma with the foreign name *kure of the rapidly expanding kingdom taking it over. Koguryŏ is referred to as 句麗, without the prefix 高, in Chinese texts, and that word is the source of *kure > EMJ (kau)kuri, contrary to Beckwith (2004: 31-32), who claims that the strings 高句麗,高麗 ,高驪 , and 橋離 (which he says is the oldest form) all represented the same name (roughly *koklay).

Kang (2008:13) provides further support:

The name "Koguryŏ" is a combination of two elements, the first being the Chinese character 高, meaning large or high, and the second a phonetic compound 句麗, meaning village or walled town. Together th emeaning becomes large village or large fortress.

Furthermore, as mentioned above, exactly how Beckwith determined that the reading *Saklai 索離 rather than *Kaklai 橋離 is to be preferred in the Puyŏ and

Koguryŏ foundation myths is unclear. Not only has Beckwith not cited the textual variants on the basis of which he makes this determination, he gives the impression that

*Kaklai 橋離 is the putatively correct reading and generally accepted. Byington (2003:

255), however, gives quite a different impression, presenting Tuoli 橐離, not Kuoli 橋離, as the standard name and citing the full number of textual variants: the first character of the northern kingdom in the Puyŏ foundation myth is variously given as tuo 橐 suo 索 gao 高 and bao 褒; more variants are attested as well (255 fn 5) That Beckwith also overlooks this data as well further suggests that his aim is the addition of further peoples to the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex rather than the faithful description of those

peoples' histories, strengthening the impression given by his circular use of uncited textual variants as the basis for unattested Indo-Iranian ethnic or place names.

In making these connections between Koguryŏ and the Central Eurasian Cultural

Complex, Beckwith has made extensive use of the 'Puyŏ-Koguryŏic' foundation myth, from which the words he renders as *Saklai and *Ortu are both taken.7 In fact, he sees the myth as an instantiation of what he calls the First Story, a common inheritance of all the peoples who came under the influence of the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex.

The First Story, we are told, is an exposition of the beliefs that make the Central Eurasian

Cultural Complex what it is: concern for justice, a love of freedom, hatred of tyranny, and the lifestyle of steppe warriors:

The subject people lived for a time under the unjust rule of their conquerors, and as their vassals they fought for them. By fighting in their conquerors' armies, the subject people acquired the life-style of steppe warriors. They also learned from their rulers the ideal of the hero in the First Story, which was sung in different versions over and over from campfire to campfire around the kingdom along with other heroic epics that told stories almost as old, with a similar moral. (2009: 11)

The First Story provides the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex with its essential characteristics. The lifestyle of steppe warriors characteristic of Central Eurasian peoples - the comitatus, a band of warriors sworn to loyally protect their lord, to die for him if they must, and, should he predecease them, to commit suicide to accompany him in death - provides a foil for the acquisitive, materialistic, and anti-aristocratic spirit of the Modernism, defined as permanent revolution, that Beckwith takes as representative of

Littoral culture. To complete this juxtaposition, Beckwith needs to make the Central

7 Furthermore, as noted before, he assumes that a common 'Puyŏ-Koguryŏic' belonging to a ' P u y ŏ - Koguryŏic' people is a viable entity. This assumption is problematic, however, as Byington 2003 indicates. We will return to this question soon. 23

Eurasian Cultural Complex into a monolithic cultural entity, with its own coherent ethos, consistent over millenia, and its own creation myth, its own First Story. Against the commandment to multiply and subdue the earth is posed the injunction to loyally serve and die for the lord of one's comitatus.

To this end, Beckwith provides nine examples of the First Story, which are adaptations of the foundation myths of the Zhou Chinese, the Scythians, the Romans, the

Xiongnu, The Wu-sun, the people of Koguryo, the Persians, the Turks, and the Mongols.

Beckwith's presentation of the Koguryo foundation story is as follows:

In the northern land of *Saklai a prince was miraculously born. Though his father was the sun god and his mother was the daughter of the River Lord, the king of the country took the child and cast him to the beasts. But the pigs and horses and birds of the wilderness kept him warm, so the boy did not die.

Because the king could not kill the boy, he allowed his mother to raise him. When the prince was old enough, he was ordered to serve the king as horse herder. He was an excellent archer and was given the name TümeN.

The king was warned by his sons that TümeN was too dangerous and would take over the kingdom. They plotted to kill him, but TümeN's mother warned him in time, and he fled southward.

Reaching a river that he could not ford, he struck the river with his bow and called out, "I am the son of the sun and the grandson of the River Lord. My enemeies are upon me. How can I cross? The alligators and soft-shelled turtles floated together to make a bridge. When TümeN had crossed over they dispersed, so his enemies could not reach him.

He built Ortu, his capital, and established a new kingdom. His realm was divided into four constituent parts, with one lord (*ka) over each of the four directions. (2009: 7)

Here everything falls into place. The readings *Saklai and *Ortu provide links with the

Central Eurasian Cultural Complex; their inclusion in one instantiation of the First Story provides a further link. Beckwith has worked Koguryo into a chain of conquerors and conquered extending back from the Hittites, through the Scythians, into all of Central

Eurasia and eastward to Manchuria, the Korean peninsula, and eventually Japan. If we accept Beckwith's reading, it would seem that the people of Koguryŏ regarded themselves as escaping from the land of *Saklai, a Scythian kingdom of indeterminate location. The founder of Koguryŏ, though treated unjustly by his overlords, learned their methods of archery and horse herding, and when he escaped he brought these methods with him, going so far as to name his capital after the encampment of the lord and his comitatus, a form of which he himself possessed in the form of his four ka.

This can be taken as the summation of Beckwith's argument for including

Koguryŏ in the purview of the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex. However, just as the readings *Saklai and *Ortu rest on shaky philological foundation, the implicit claim that

Koguryŏ was founded by refugees from a Scythian kingdom, and one located to the north of their eventual home in Manchuria and the northern Korean peninsula at that, is quite a novel one. In fact, as we will see shortly, the kings of Koguryŏ did believe themselves descended from refugees from a northern kingdom. However, this was not a Scythian kingdom, one link of many in the eastward transmission of the Central Eurasian Cultural

Complex, and the belief held more pragmatic than religious import.

Part 2. Making Sense of the Koguryŏ Foundation Myth

Having considered Beckwith's use of etymology to forge links between Koguryŏ and the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex culminating in the presentation of the

Koguryŏ founding story as one more version of the First Story of the Central Eurasian

Cultural Complex, it may be profitable to take a closer look at that story. Beckwith

(2009: 7, fn. 29) has this to say about it: "The earliest recorded version is in the Lun heng, by Wang Ch'ung, a first-century AD text, followed by the Wei lüeh, a lost work quoted in the annotations to the San kuo chih, a third-century AD text. The earliest version written by the Koguryo themselves is found in the King Kwanggaet'o memorial inscription of

414."

If we return to Byington, we see that the situation is in fact quite more complicated than this. First, the account given in the Lun heng is not the foundation myth of Koguryŏ at all. Rather, it is an account of the founding of the Puyŏ state, Koguryŏ's neighbor to the north (Byington 2003: 29). According to this account, the founder of

Puyŏ, Tongmyong 東明 (rendered TümeN by Beckwith), fled southward from the kingdom Tuoli橐離(compare Beckwith's statement on the "putatively correct" character

Kuo橋mentioned above) and became the ruler of Puyŏ (29, 495). Indeed, it is reported in the San guo zhi that the elders of Puyŏ referred to themselves as refugees亡人. It is, however, not clear what exactly this means (29, 495).

Furthermore, in the Koguryŏ version of this story, adapted from the Puyŏ version, the founder, now known as Chumong, escapes not from Tuoli or *Saklai but from Puyŏ itself and founds Koguryŏ, whose capital is not Wantu or *Ortu but, depending on which text one consults, Cholbon or Hulsung-gol (30). Accordingly, the various versions of the story involving Tongmyong/Chumong/TümeN are more profitably understood as comprising two primary layers: first, the foundation myth of Puyŏ, comprising an old mythical account of uncertain origin and, second, an adaptation of this story which, mutatis mutandis, is made to refer to the foundation of Koguryŏ. Indeed, Byington (496) notes that the Koguryŏ myth is "particularly suspicious," being modified from its Puyŏ model only in the details of the hero's home and his destination. As such, Beckwith's observation, "It would be odd for the Koguryŏ to have said that the ancestral founder of the Koguryŏ kingdom fled from a northern kingdom named Koguryŏ” (2007: 32), is a valid one. However, such a claim is not to be found in the Koguryŏ foundation myth, in which the Koguryŏ founder is said to have fled from a northern kingdom named Puyŏ.

The problem is only a problem when the Puyŏ and Koguryŏ stories are conflated.

Moreover, there are significant discrepancies even among different versions of the story as adapted to Koguryŏ, the common element being the claim of Koguryŏ origin in refugees from Puyŏ. For example, the two earliest expressions of the myth, those found on the 414 King Kwanggaet'o Stele and a slightly later inscription a Koguryo tomb at

Ji'an, identify Chumong's point of departure as "Northern Puyŏ" (Byington 2003: 240), identified as the Puyŏ kingdom in Jilin mentioned in in the Introduction. Later versions of the story, however, diverge. The Samguk sagi, for example, states that Chumong fled from a coastal region known as Eastern Puyŏ (234). Chumong's divine parentage also

admits of variations: he is taken as the son of the Heavenly Empeor, of Hae Mosu, or of the sun god (237). The variations are even more numerous and enumerating them singly would prove too lengthy a digression. The variations do, however, strongly suggest that the unity among these different versions which Beckwith would require in order for his interpretation to make sense does not exist, and that his presentation of the story, both in 2007 and 2009, is a harmonization and conflation of Puyŏ and Koguryŏ elements. The details of the Puyŏ and Koguryŏ foundation myths - the history, that is, in so far as it is recoverable, of Central Eurasia and Central Eurasians that Beckwith set out to describe - has been overlooked. The facts in all their variety have been made to fit into the schematic of the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex which, if it is to be a worthy opponent of the Littoral System, must be as extensive as possible.

Putting aside all these variations of the Puyŏ and Koguryŏ versions of the

Tongmyong/Chumong story, why should the people of Koguryo have adopted the foundation myth of Puyŏ, a state with whom they had fought in the past and whose territory they ultimately overtook after Puyŏ's defeat by the Xianbei? Byington considers these origin stories to be part of the process of state formation and to have as their goal less the accurate description of a people's historical origin, which may well have been long forgotten even to them, than the forging of a common political and mythic identity:

Regardless of how the early states might actually have taken form, the foundation myths present a version of state formation that served the interests of the authors of those myths. That is, the myths were a means of describing state and elite origins as the authors would have wished them to be perceived by others. (2003, 497)

The origins of Puyŏ, except that its pre-state predecessors were the peoples of the

Xituanshan culture, and those of Koguryŏ as well, are lost to history and it is not

sufficient to seek those origins in the foundation stories of those states. What may be found there, however, is a reflection of the social realities of those states at the time their mythic origins were decided upon and recorded and what the authors of the foundation myths felt about those realities. Byington notes that in the case of the Puyŏ myth, the rulers are set apart from those they rule by virtue of their foreign origin (500). This, it is argued, serves to make the difference between governors and governed acceptable, in effect "validating a social structure that permits and guarantees the existence of a small, non-producing wealthy elite, who derive their livelihood from the toil of the governed populations" (500). That is, the Puyŏ foundation story, representing as it does the rulers of the state as descended from a founding figure of divine descent, grants the rulers similar divine sanction, thus legitimating inegalitarian social structures typical of the state. The divine wanderer is a later fiction, not an historical reality.

Koguryŏ's adaptation of the Puyŏ story, Byington contends, is similarly motivated by concern with political legitimacy, though in a different way. Compared to Koguryŏ,

Puyŏ was an elder state. Its antecedents first came into contact with and under the influence of the Chinese in the third century BCE. It was highly regarded by the Chinese court (504), as described above, and entered into an alliance with the Eastern Han, by which it became yet more of a power in the region, conducting successful campaigns against the younger Koguryŏ state from the first century BCE. Even after Koguryŏ had assimilated the territory of the former Puyŏ state in 410, memories of what Puyŏ once had been remained strong. Accordingly, the kings of Koguryŏ claimed descent from

Puyŏ as a means of constructing what Byington refers to as a veneer of antiquity and long-held legitimacy: "this quality," he continues, "would be particularly useful for

communicating with states in the Central Plains of China, where respect for political pedigree has long dictated the language of statecraft" (505) Furthermore, it was not only

Koguryŏ that claimed such descent from Puyŏ. Paekche did as well, though Paekche claimed descent indirectly through the ruling house of Koguryo (496, 505).

We can therefore see that Beckwith's treatment of the Koguryŏ foundation story, even with all of its attendant etymological apparatus, is very much a simplification of a long and complicated process involving the appropriation of of the Puyŏ foundation myth by Koguryŏ, followed by the later appropriation of the already appropriated story by

Paekche. In addition, far from celebrating that "the unjust overlords who suppressed the righteous people and stole their wealth were finally overthrown, and the men who did the deed were national heroes" (2009: 11), these myths served to establish a veneer of antiquity and legitimacy for the ruling houses of Koguryŏ and Paekche, thus granting them respectability in inter-regional politics and establishing their right to live on the labor of those whom they ruled.

Part 3. What Does This All Mean?

We have briefly introduced Puyŏ and Koguryŏ as Byington presented them. We have continued to an overview of Beckwith's concepts of the Central Eurasian Cultural

Complex, the Littoral System and its offspring Modernism, and the conflict between these two forces. We have further seen Beckwith's use of etymology to link Koguryŏ and

Japan with the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex, culminating in his presentation of the

Koguryŏ foundation myth, augmented with his readings *Saklai and *Ortu, as an instantiation of the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex's First Story. We have considered this analysis in comparison to Byington's treatment of the Puyŏ and Koguryŏ stories and have seen that it is a harmonization and conflation of disparate versions of the story used by different people to further different, but very specific and concrete, political aims. By now it is not unreasonable to conclude that Beckwith's use of the Koguryŏ data has been subordinate to the end of making Koguryŏ a member of the Central Eurasian Cultural

Complex, sharing its salient cultural, mythological, and religious features, irrespective of its historical realities. This aim itself, I contend, is itself subordinate to a larger, essentially mythopoeic aim of Beckwith's work, hints of which are to be found in his presentation of the First Story.

Having presented all his examples of the First Story, Beckwith writes:

No one can say that the heroes who accomplished these deeds for their people did not do them. The Chou Dynasty of China, the Roman Empire, the Wu-sun Kingdom, and the

Hsiung-nu Empire are all historical facts, as are the realms of the Koguryŏ, the Türk, the Mongols, and others. How these nations really were founded is obscured by the mists of time, in which the merging of legendary story and history is nearly total. (...) Yet that is unimportant. What really mattered was that the unjust overlords who suppressed the righteous people and stole their wealth were finally overthrown, and the men who did the deed were national heroes. (2009, 11)

That is, the path of the unrighteous shall perish. Irrespective of the uses the people of

Puyŏ or Koguryŏ may have made of his story, Tongmyong/Chumon appears as a

Manchurian Brutus, an Aristogeiton of the steppes, liberating his people from oppressive overlords.8 When viewed in the light of Byington's account, this is clearly romanticism.

It is, however, not without purpose.

Quite contrarily, this collection of disparate elements into a common mythology is at the center of Beckwith's work. These motifs of oppression by unjust ovelords and triumph against it by a righteous founding hero, I believe, are meant to serve as prefigurations of the present day struggle between Modernism, the offpsring of the

Littoral peoples, and the respect for Reason, Nature, and the old aristocratic order represented by the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex, the ultimate but forgotten source of common world culture. Beckwith poses the question,

Can the peoples of Central Eurasia - and of Europe, Russia, the Middle East, India, and China - learn from the past, or will they continue to repeat its mistakes? Can they recover from the disasters wrought by Modernism, fundamentalism, and nationalist racism without destroying themselves and the rest of the world? And will Europeans, Russians, Iranians, and Chinese who now dominate Central Eurasia, our common heartland, finally allow that font of creativity the freedom to flourish once again? (2009: 319)

8 In this connection, consider Beckwith 2009: 293: 'The substitution of populist ideals for aristocratic ones necessarily eliminated the idea of cultural paragons - the great men who, as Yeats put it, "walk in a cloth of gold, and display their passionate hearts, that the groundlings may feel their souls wax the greater." In all spheres of society, there was no longer any higher model to aspire to.' We need such models again; Beckwith seeks them in the heroes of the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex's First S t o r y . 32

He answers,

It depends on whether they can restore the rule of Reason, reject the Modernist legacy of populist demagoguery, and make a firm commitment to join the rest of the world not as fanatics or tyrants but as partners. (319)

To borrow the terminology of Biblical typology, each of the types in Beckwith's

First Story finds an antitype in the present-day struggle between the Littoral powers and

Central Eurasia. The Littoral powers, under the spell of Modernism, have forgotten their

Central Eurasian heritage, and as colonial powers have brutally oppressed the people of

Central Eurasia, their common heartland. They have suppressed righteous people and stolen their wealth just as their types, the unjust overlords in the various versions of the

First Story, did before them; they have repeated the mistakes and iniquities of the past and sinned as their fathers did. Beckwith's vision of a resurgent Central Eurasia and a rediscovery of our common Central Eurasian heritage culminates in the overthrowing of these unjust social structures, just as it did in the First Story. The nations of the world coming together as partners, as comites, after the present social order has been overthrown bears a definite resemblance to the comitatus, the social structure of the

Central Eurasian Cultural Complex, the ancient and rightful order of human affairs unjustly supplanted by Modernism and its attendant populist demagoguery. The nations of the world will become partners in a comitatus, just as the founding hero in the First

Story had his sworn band of warriors. "The warriors of Central Eurasia," he writes,

"were not barbarians. They were heroes, and the epics of their peoples sing their undying fame" (2009: xxv). Quite the opposite, it is we, the Littoral powers, who are the true barbarians; with the resurgence of Central Eurasia and the restoration of the values of the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex, the founding heroes of the First Story will live again and their fame will be truly undying.

For Beckwith, in the end all will be as it was in the beginning. A global comitatus will be established, and nation will no longer take up arms against nation. What

Beckwith would make of the conflicts between Koguryŏ and Puyŏ, or the story related in

Livy that Romulus slew Remus for stepping over his walls, is unclear, though these parallels suggest that Beckwith's representations of Koguryŏ and the other states he takes as representative of the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex are less concerned with the historical or linguistic realities of these states than they are with granting the struggle between the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex and the Littoral powers under the spell of

Modernism a mythological prefiguration that points a way toward that struggle's resolution. Indeed, we are even told, "I hope that some of the points I have noticed, and the arguments I have made, will lead to a better understanding of it [Modernism] and maybe even point the way to improving the human condition today" (2009 xiii).

The way to improving the human condition today, I posit, consists for Beckwith in rejecting Modernism and restoring the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex. This concern is to be found throughout his work. We have seen it in his work on Koguryŏ, ancillary as it is to his presentation of the Koguryŏ foundation myth as a version of the

First Story. His invocation of "Archaic Northeastern Middle Chinese," his use of

Szemerényi's work, and his conflation of disparate versions of the Puyŏ and Koguryŏ foundation myths are all subordinate to this goal. That is, Beckwith employs history and etymology alike in the service of the broader goal of establishing what is essentially a mythological framework for understanding what he sees as the defining conflict of modern life, a conflict that he hopes will be concluded with the rejection of Modernism.

It is interesting to note the parallels between the method Beckwith employs and that which the authors of the Puyŏ and Koguryŏ foundation stories did. Just as the Puyŏ elites claimed foreign extraction to claim the legitimacy of their rule and just as the

Koguryŏ elites claimed Puyŏ descent to claim the gravitas possessed by the elder state, a move in which Paekche would follow them, so Beckwith makes use, indeed frequently quite ingenious use, of this material and related etymological material to create a veneer of antiquity and long-held legitimacy for the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex.

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